ENG 279, 290 - Literature as Politics

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement HU (and IL when offered as 290).
Meets Explore Core requirement (students beginning Fall 2024 and later): HS
Meets requirement: W
Students in this class will approach narratives, poems, and plays as rhetorical acts and sites of ideological struggle and will address and question widespread arguments that, on the one hand, reduce, literary works to the politics of writers and their times and, on the other hand, claim that as “art,” literary works “transcend” politics. Writers studied are likely to include Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, W. B. Yeats, W. E. B. DuBois, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, Muriel Rukeyser, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Joan Didion, Mohsin Hamid, etc. Satisfies departmental Social Justice and Prose or Poetry requirements.